How Amper Uses Mosaic for Better Board Management & Cross-functional Empowerment
“When I receive high-stakes requests from my CEO saying, ‘I have a meeting with an investor coming up. Can you answer XYZ?’ I used to respond with, ‘let me get back to you in a few hours after I crunch the numbers.’ But now I just pull up our Mosaic dashboard with real-time data and deliver answers in minutes. Mosaic has been a huge win for me personally and for our relationship with investors.”
Joel Blachman
Operations and Finance Lead, Amper Technologies
About Amper Technologies
Amper helps manufacturers digitize their factory operations. It is the only production management system designed for adoption — giving manufacturers the tools and roadmap they need to connect their people, processes, and assets in one place.
The Challenge
Fixing Inefficiencies for the Next Level of Growth
Enough’s Enough
In 2021, Operations and Finance Lead Joel Blachman was reporting directly to the CEO and managing all accounting, FP&A, and business operations workflows.
As part of the Series A due diligence, Joel spent countless hours perfecting a comprehensive SaaS metrics dashboard in Excel. During the fundraising process, he had to continuously update the metrics every month and quarter. “I was like, ‘nuts, I have to go re-create and update all of this?!’ It took forever. There was no easy way to update the spreadsheets and dashboards while maintaining accuracy. That was a big problem.”
But this wasn’t an isolated incident. Reporting directly to the CEO meant that Joel would often get messages with ad hoc reporting requests from prospective investors during their previous fundraising process. “I wasn’t able to provide that information quickly. It was just way too slow for what my CEO needed, and I hated that feeling.”
Manual reporting also impacted the financial planning process. Since Amper has an IoT component with inventory costs, balance sheet planning (particularly inventory planning) was essential to understanding the full financial picture of the business.
Making the business case
After a 3-4 month evaluation looking at a variety of tools, Joel found Mosaic’s Role Forward podcast. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “Every episode mirrors the challenges I’m facing today. I have to look into Mosaic.”
While Joel was looking at subscription management tools to level up the finance tech stack, they didn’t quite address Amper’s core business challenges. Joel prioritized his needs as:
- Better visibility into revenue and expenses in one place
- Greater accountability and control over budgets
- Multi-year forecasts and 3-statement financial modeling
Mosaic addressed all of Amper’s needs, and after a well-crafted business case email to the CEO, Joel got the approval to purchase Mosaic and get started.
“The implementation process was super easy with Mosaic’s team doing most of the setup. Plus, Mosaic comes out with so many new features that it’s almost hard to keep up with it all. The rapid pace of product development is so exciting and inspires me to continuously level up Amper’s finance capabilities — as well as my own.”
The Solution
Building a Series A-Worthy FP&A Function
Joel and his team now have visibility into the performance metrics they rely on to run their business and keep investors informed. Mosaic enables them to see SaaS metrics, revenue, expenses, and balance sheet items all in one place as they strategically deploy their newly raised capital.
“Mosaic gives us incredible, real-time data visualization at the click of a button. It comes with all the SaaS metrics we need out of the box (and then some)! Visualized. Accurate. Multi-dimensional. It’s all there.”
But Amper isn’t just using Mosaic to improve their data analysis. They are also using Mosaic to take their financial forecasting and modeling process to new heights. The leadership team needs to be accountable for how the company spends money over the next two to three years so they can keep revenue growth and cash burn in line with growth goals. Mosaic helps Amper’s team stay aligned on budgets and control their spend.
“I’m proud to say that we prepared our entire annual budget exclusively in Mosaic. Frankly, I don’t know how we would have delivered a high-quality budget on time without Mosaic!”
In addition, Joel and team are now able to plan and report on key balance sheet items like inventory, prepaid expenses, billings, accounts receivable, DSO, and cash burn in a way they couldn’t before. With capital efficiency top of mind for investors these days, this has been an absolute game-changer in fundraising efforts and investor relations.
“Now when I meet with our CEO to review financial and business performance, we pull up Mosaic during the conversation. It’s next to us at all times. We’ve accelerated the pace and improved the quality of decision making with the ability to slice and dice data right there in the meeting. This is another big win for Amper.”
The Impact
Rising to the Occasion in the Biggest Moments
One of the primary wins for Joel is the speed at which he’s able to deliver key insights and analysis to the CEO in high-stakes moments. The productivity gains have been huge. Joel can now finally break free from the days of tedious, manual work and focus on immediate value delivery.
“When we prepare for our board meetings, which are very KPI heavy, instead of manually crunching numbers and updating my spreadsheets, we just run our dashboards automatically in Mosaic with data from the current quarter. I’m done with data prep in a matter of minutes and then I spend the rest of my time analyzing the numbers in order to craft a narrative for the board.”
The impact has also up-leveled finance’s relationship with other business team leaders. “For our CS team and other executive leaders, net and gross dollar retention are obviously really important. Mosaic gave me the confidence to roll out commission plans based on NDR and GDR because I trust the numbers and I can show my whole team in real time.”
“Mosaic is great. A huge value add for our team. We’ve leveled up our finance tech stack and everyone in the company is aware that this is the platform we rely on.”
